The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventor(s), to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
IEEE 802.11 is a set of standards that govern wireless networking transmission methods. Versions of the set of standards of IEEE 802.11 that are commonly used today to provide wireless connectivity include 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n.
IEEE 802.11ac is a wireless computer networking standard of 802.11 currently under development which will provide high throughput Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) below 6 GHz, which is commonly known as the 5 GHz band. The IEEE 802.11ac specification describes multi-station WLAN throughput of at least 1 Gigabit per second and a maximum single link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (500 Mbit/s). This is accomplished by extending the air interface concepts embraced by IEEE 802.11n with wider radio frequency (RF) bandwidth (e.g., IEEE 802.11ac permits channel bandwidths of 80 MHz and 160 MHz as compared with a maximum channel bandwidth of 40 Mhz in 802.11n), more MIMO spatial streams (up to 8), multi-user MIMO, and high-density modulation (up to 256 QAM Quadrature amplitude modulation).
However, operating an RF radio and analog front end to receive and transmit packets having a bandwidth of 80 MHz or 160 MHz typically consumes a substantial amount power.